Don’t Aim for Happiness

Dalrymple reacts to a book called Becoming Your Real Self: A Practical Toolkit for Managing Life’s Challenges:

…I don’t really believe in our true self. Perhaps I have heard too many people who repeatedly did the most terrible things and said that those things were not expressions of their real selves to be other than impatient of the whole concept of the real self. We may sometimes act out of character, in fact we all sometimes do, but that is another thing entirely; we cannot act out of character all the time, because how we act all the time is our character.